How Zap Energy and Cyth Systems are engineering fusion power into reality, and the platform making it possible.

The electrode sitting on stage at NI Connect told the whole story: burned, distorted, and made unusable by conditions that exist almost nowhere else on Earth. It served as a stark reminder that fusion energy—clean, carbon-free, and effectively limitless—does not just demand bold physics. It demands engineering that can survive them.

Zap Energy is building that engineering, one plasma shot at a time.

Founded around a different approach to fusion than the massive superconducting magnet systems that have defined the field for decades, Zap uses strong pulses of electric current to create the magnetic field that confines plasma. The result is a compact, modular device roughly 10 feet long that strips away much of the complexity and cost that has historically made fusion power difficult to scale. Each shot carries up to 20 times the peak current of a lightning bolt. A single device is designed to generate approximately 50 MW of power, enough to power a small city. And unlike virtually any equivalent energy technology, it can operate on demand, with virtually no emissions, and can be located almost anywhere.

“Our work is about reliability and scalability,” says Marvi Matos Rodriguez, who brings an aerospace background to Zap’s engineering challenges. “Combining bold physics with disciplined engineering to move from promising research to consistent megawatts.”

For the past 24 months, Zap has been ramping operations at Century, its subscale test plant designed to validate the full system at progressively higher performance levels. Century runs extremely high temperatures, extremely high voltages, and thousands of kilograms of flowing liquid metal under vacuum. It fires plasma over and over in rapid succession, with each run gathering data that moves the program closer to grid-ready power.

The physics are only solvable if the controls are reliable. Coordinating large bursts of energy measured in microseconds, inside a brutally demanding environment, means that every component and control decision must perform to a standard that has no real precedent outside of the stars. That is where Cyth Systems came in.

Cyth Systems has been an NI Partner for more than 25 years. When Zap Energy needed to synchronize 24 high-voltage pulsed power modules controlling current flow in the magnetic field, the solution required extremely precise timing, fast processing, custom logic, and continuous safety monitoring.

“Turning extreme physics into a safe and reliable commercial system is not your everyday project,” says Joe Spinozzi of Cyth Systems.

The team built the full control stack on NI CompactRIO and LabVIEW, using the FPGA to coordinate all 24 subsystems with deterministic timing. They achieved 1.6 nanosecond trigger skew across all channels to ensure complete synchronization of the pulsed power modules. That level of precision is not a performance enhancement. It is a fundamental requirement for the physics to work.

What made the platform choice particularly valuable was not just the initial specification. It was the flexibility to evolve. The project began primarily with high-speed digital I/O, but as Zap’s design progressed and new requirements emerged, the breadth of C Series modules allowed the system to expand without requiring a platform change. New signals, new sensors, and new processing requirements were all absorbed by the same architecture.

“By building on a common, flexible platform, we were able to shave months off development time while keeping the system ready to evolve with Zap’s design,” says Spinozzi.

The path from Century to a commercial reactor delivering power to the grid is long. But the foundation being built now—the control architecture, the validation infrastructure, and the engineering discipline, applied to conditions that have never been tamed before—is what makes that path traversable.

“To get to our first commercial megawatt, we will keep pushing our technology to new levels until commercial fusion helps power the planet,” says Matos Rodriguez. “Cyth and the NI platform are critical infrastructure for that journey.”

There is something profound about the fact that the same platform used to validate automotive sensors and aerospace components is also the control infrastructure for a device attempting to replicate the energy of the sun. It speaks to what platform flexibility means in practice: not a feature list, but a foundation capable of meeting problems that have not been fully defined yet.

For Zap Energy and Cyth Systems, that foundation is not just an engineering choice—it is what makes the mission possible.